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Wednesday, June 28, 2017

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey
participated in a CIA program known as Project MKUltra. The project experimented
with various drugs and techniques on human subjects to expand methods of
interrogation and torture. Kesey worked as an orderly at a mental hospital where
some MKUltra tests took place. He volunteered to partake and personally
recorded his experiences, expressing a fondness for LSD. No, this is not an InfoWars article. Gross.

Kesey’s
role at the mental institution helped him hit a sweet spot in his writing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*. By
working the night shift at the hospital, he could observe patients from the
institution’s perspective. Alternatively, his involvement in experiments (with
questionable legality and ethics) allowed him to see from the patient’s side.
The line between “sane” and “insane” blurs when you realize firsthand that
larger forces are at play, designed to manipulate. You are a pawn in their big
game.

Checkmate! Kesey
isn’t anyone’s bitch. After reading about him in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I’m
impressed with his ability to be in
all the craziness but also above all
the craziness. He’s a participant but also seemingly omniscient. I mean, the
guy elected to try electroshock therapy on himself so that he could accurately
write about the experience in Cuckoo.

And, in my
opinion, he nails it. Kesey’s vivid characters are no accident. Our narrator is
“Chief” Bromden, a schizophrenic half-Native American. He and the rest of the
ward are greatly affected when a new, raucous man, Randal McMurphy, is
committed to the hospital. McMurphy is not mentally ill in the conventional
sense—he uses insanity as a means to avoid his sentence at a prison work farm. Gradually,
he brings clarity to the other patients who had formerly subserviently yielded
to every order from above. The head nurse, Nurse Ratched, is not pleased with
the patients’ newfound gall, and she and McMurphy butt heads in big ways.

Kesey is
the ultimate real-life anti-conformist, so it’s fitting that he’d write a novel
that addresses the oppressive powers of institutions—specifically
government-sanctioned ones. Ironically, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of many novels often found on banned-books lists. Nothing like trying to stifle a book
about the cruelty of stifling an individual’s agency.

Mental
health services in our country are still inadequate, but they’re not as
barbaric as they were during the time of Kesey’s writing. Of course, the
hospital in the book is symbolic of other domineering authorities that Kesey
railed against; however, there is also a literal denunciation of mental health
procedures within the novel, particularly electroshock therapy.

While
Kesey’s novel receives largely positive reception, there are some complaints
about the text’s overt racism (the orderlies’ race is ridiculed and the N-word
is used) and underlying sexism (McMurphy fights “the matriarchy” aka a woman
nurse and generally women are depicted as conniving to emasculate the men
around them). McMurphy’s questionable character certainly warrants discussion,
but it doesn’t make Cuckoo a *bad
book* unworthy of reading. As I mention in my review of The Awakening, characters are
complex and imperfect, which is exactly what makes them interesting, McMurphy
is a sexist, racist pig, so he speaks and acts like a sexist, racist, pig. That
doesn’t mean that his crusade against conformity should be ignored. His
character flaws and insecurities add to the intricacy of the discussion.

Equipped
with the knowledge of Kesey’s background that contributed to the unique
perspective in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, I give the novel 4 out of 5 camel humps. In the
future, I would love to compare his work to Girl Interrupted, which is a more contemporary display of the problems that
continue to plague mental health diagnoses and treatment.

*Kesey, Ken. One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York, The Viking Press, Inc., 1962. Print.

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Lyndsay West

About Me

I’m a 25 year old lover of reading and writing. I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013. Currently, I live in New York City making my writing mark on the world via freelance work. Other interests include religious studies, philosophy, psychology, dancing, and live music.

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